A low-complexity colour image compression scheme based on adaptive decimation is considered. Reconstruction of the encoded image is performed with an intelligent edge prediction algorithm which is capable of maintaining a reasonable coding fidelity, as well as a natural and pleasant visual effect for the object contours contained in the picture. The method involves only a small amount of computation in both the encoding and decoding processes and hence can be implemented to operate in real time with simple hardware and a small amount of memory storage. Results obtained by applying the proposed scheme for encoding colour images at a high compression ratio are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach and its potential in practical applications